(5) From a very early age the child desires to know the why and wherefore of things, to understand how effects are produced, to discover new facts, and pass on, if possible, to their causes. In response to the pressure of this instinct, the child breaks his toys in order that he may find out how they work, and asks innumerable questions which make him the terror and despair of his parents and the other "Olympians." No instinct is more insistent in the early days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This gibe is the plain statement of a patent truth.

We will call this the inquisitive instinct.

(6) After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them, and so be the better able to control the working of them. The ends that he sets before himself are those which Comte set before the human race,—"savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire, afin de construire." The desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways and means, to master the resources of Nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like. Set him on a sandy shore, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats into which the sea may be duly admitted. Or he will make harness and whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate, boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other implements of wood.

We will call this the constructive instinct.

In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels of theory and practice, into what I may call the machinery of Nature's life,—an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of Eastern philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the Many, rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the One.[16] Whichever channel he may use,—and indeed they are not so much two channels as one, for each in turn is for ever leading into and then passing out of the other,—his concern is always for "facts," for the actualities of things, for "objective truth." We will therefore call these the Scientific Instincts, and place them in a class by themselves.

There are six instincts, then,—six formative and expansive instincts—which Nature has implanted in every normal child, and which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to Nature, should take account of and try to foster. Two of these are sympathetic; two are aesthetic; two are scientific. In and through the sympathetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of love. In and through the aesthetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of beauty. In and through the scientific instincts the soul grows in the direction of truth. It is towards this triune goal that Nature herself is ever directing the growth of the growing child. The significance of this conclusion will unfold itself as we proceed.

These instincts manifest themselves in various ways, but chiefly in the direction that they give to that very serious occupation of young children which we call play. It is clear, then, that if these instincts are to be duly cultivated, the work of the school must be modelled, as far as possible, on the lines which children, when at play, spontaneously follow. This Egeria, with her inspired sagacity, has clearly seen; and she has taken her measures accordingly. In Utopia the school life of the child is all play,—play taken very seriously, play systematised, organised, provided with ample materials and ample opportunities, encouraged and stimulated in every possible way. Each of the fundamental instincts that manifest themselves in the child's play, and in doing so give a clear indication of Nature's aims in the child's life, and of the directions in which she wishes him to grow, is duly ministered to in this school, the current that wells up in and through it being skilfully guided into a suitable channel, and every obstacle to its free development being carefully removed. But the guidance which Egeria gives tends, as we shall see, to foster rather than fetter the freedom of the child. When the current has been led into a suitable channel, it is expected to shape its own further course, and even to impose on itself the limits—the containing walls—which are needed if its depth and strength are to be maintained.

Let us now consider each of the six instincts in turn, and see what special steps Egeria takes to foster its growth.

(1) The Communicative Instinct.

Through this instinct the child goes out of himself into the lives of other persons and other living things. The desire is in its essence one for intercourse, for communion, for the interchange of thoughts, of feelings, of experiences. The normal child is, as we all know, an inveterate chatterbox; but he is also a rapt listener. If he desires, as he certainly does, to tell others about himself, he desires, in no less a degree, to hear about others, either from themselves, or from those who are best able to tell him about them. The balance between the two desires is well maintained by Nature; and it should be carefully maintained by those who train the young, if the communicative instinct as a whole is to make healthy growth.

In too many elementary schools the instinct is systematically starved, the scholars being strictly forbidden to talk among themselves, while their conversational intercourse with their teacher is limited to receiving a certain amount of dry information, and giving this back, collectively or individually, when they are expressly directed to do so. The child's instinctive desire to converse, being deprived by education of its natural outlets, must needs force for itself the subterranean and illicit outlet of whispering in class, either under the teacher's nose, if he happens to be unobservant or indolent, or behind his back, if he happens to be vigilant and strict. And as the child is forbidden to talk about things which are wholesome and interesting, it is but natural that in his surreptitious conversations he should talk about things which are less edifying, things which are trivial and vulgar, or even unwholesome and unclean. Children are naturally obedient and truthful; but in their attempts to find outlets for healthy activities which are wantonly repressed, they will go far down the inclined plane of disobedience and deceit.

In Utopia free conversation is systematically encouraged. No elementary school is supposed to open before 9 a.m.; but Egeria is in the habit of coming to school at 8.45 or earlier, so that the children who wish to do so may come and talk to her freely about the things that interest them,—what they have observed on their walks to or from school, what they have heard or read at home, what they think about things in general, and so on. The school has a good library of books which are worth reading, both in prose and verse. These the children read in school and out of school, and are thus brought into communication with other minds, with other times, with other lands. They are also accustomed to talk freely to one another about the books that they are reading. Whatever lesson may be going on, they are encouraged to ask questions about the matter in hand, and even to express their own views about it. They go out into the playground in groups and make up games and plays, discussing things freely among themselves. When they are preparing to act an historical scene or a passage from some dramatic author, they hold a sort of informal parliament, in which the actors are selected and various important questions are provisionally settled. They write letters in school to real people. The older girls take the little ones in hand, and talk to them and draw them out. When an interesting phenomenon is noticed, e.g. in a Nature ramble, the children are accustomed to discuss it in groups, and to try to think out among themselves its cause and its meaning. Gossip is of course discouraged; but it is scarcely necessary for Egeria to proscribe it; for idle talk has no attraction for children who are allowed to talk freely and frankly, at all times and in all places, about things that are really worth discussing. Life is full of interest for children who are allowed, as these are, to take an active interest in it; and subjects of conversation are therefore ever presenting themselves, in school and out of school, to the happy children of Utopia. This means that the life of each individual child is overflowing through many channels, an overflow which will carry the out-welling life into the lives of other living beings—human and infra-human, actual and imaginary—and even beyond these, when it has been met and reinforced by other surging currents, into the impersonal life of Humanity and of Nature.

(2) The Dramatic Instinct.

Whatever else young children may be, they are all born actors; and in a school which bases its scheme of education on the actualities of child life, it is but natural that the dramatic instinct should be fostered in every possible way. "Work while you work, and play while you play," is one of those trite maxims which have been unintelligently repeated till they have lost whatever value they may once have possessed. "Work while you play, and play while you work," seems to be Egeria's substitute for it; and she would, I think, do well to write those words over the porch of her school.

In the ordinary elementary school a fair amount of acting goes on in the infant department, and an occasional attempt is made, in one of the higher classes of the upper department, to act a scene from Shakespeare or an episode in English history. But during the five years or so of school life which intervene between the infant department and "Standard VI," the dramatic instinct is as a rule entirely neglected; and the consequent outgrowth of self-consciousness in the children is too often a fatal obstacle to the success of the spasmodic attempts at dramatisation which are made in the higher classes.

In Utopia "acting" is a vital part of the school life of every class, and every subject that admits of dramatic treatment is systematically dramatised. In History, for example, when the course of their study brings them to a suitable episode, the children set to work to dramatise it. With this end in view, they consult some advanced text-book or historical novel or other book of reference, and having studied with care the particular chapter in which they are interested, and having decided among themselves who are to play what parts, they proceed to make up their own dialogues, and their own costumes and other accessories. They then act the scene, putting their own interpretation on the various parts, and receiving the stimulus and guidance of Egeria's sympathetic and moeutic criticism. Their class-mates and the rest of the children in the main room look on, with their history books open in front of them, and applaud; and, by gradually familiarising themselves with the various parts, qualify themselves half-unconsciously to act as under-studies in the particular scene, and in due course to play their own parts as interpreters of some other historical episode. I know of no treatment of history which is so effective as this for young children. The actual knowledge of the facts of history which a child carries away with him from an elementary school cannot well be large, and is, in many cases, a negligible quantity. But the child who has once acted history will always be interested in it, and being interested in it will be able, without making a formal study of it, to absorb its spirit, its atmosphere, and the more significant of its facts. Nor do the advantages of the dramatic treatment of history end with the subject itself. The actors in these historical scenes are, as I have said, expressing their own interpretation of the various parts, and their own perception of the meaning of each episode as a whole. This means that they are training their imaginative sympathy,—a sovereign faculty which of all faculties is perhaps the most emancipative and expansive,—and training it, as I can testify, with striking success; for the dramatic power which they display is remarkable, and can have been generated by nothing less than sympathetic insight into the feelings of the various historical personages and the possibilities of the various situations.

It is probable that History lends itself more readily to dramatic treatment than any other subject, but it is by no means the only subject that is dramatised in Utopia. An interest in Geography is awakened by scenes in foreign lands and episodes from books of travel being acted by the children. An interest in Arithmetic, by a shop being opened, which is well equipped with weights, measures, and cardboard money, and in which a salesman stands behind the counter and sells goods to a succession of customers. An interest in Literature by the acting, with improvised costumes, of passages from Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from Scott's and Dickens' novels. Simple plays to illustrate Nature-study are acted by the younger children; while the Folk Songs, which, as we shall see, play a prominent part in the musical life of the children, are acted as well as sung.

However rude and simple the histrionic efforts of the children may be, they are doing two things for the actors. They are giving them a living interest in the various subjects that are dramatised; and, by teaching them to identify themselves, if only for a moment, with other human beings, they are leading them into the path of tolerance, of compassion, of charity, of sympathy,—the ever-widening path which makes at last for Nirvanic oneness with the One Life.[17]

(3) The Artistic Instinct.

The desire to reproduce with pencil, paint, or clay the form and colour of the outward world will, if duly cultivated, gradually transform itself into the desire to feel, to understand, to interpret, to express, not the form and colour only of the outward world, but also that less palpable but more spiritual quality which we call beauty. But in order that this transformation may take place, the child must always endeavour to reproduce with due fidelity the more palpable qualities of colour and form. In this endeavour he must bring many faculties into play. He must observe closely and attentively. He must reflect on what he observes. He must reflect on what he himself is doing. He must compare his work with the original, and try to discover how far he has succeeded, and where he has gone astray. The more faithfully he tries to reproduce what he has seen, the clearer and surer will be his insight into the less palpable properties of things,—into those details, those aspects, those qualities, which do not reveal themselves to the first careless glance, but which will gradually reveal themselves to those who will take the trouble to discover them. When he is asked to reproduce things which are intrinsically beautiful—flowers, branches, buds, shells, butterflies, and the like—he begins to realise that if his work is to be successful, he must do justice to many impalpable, though not imperceptible, details which go to the making up of beauty. So the sense of beauty, the feeling for it, the desire to bring it into his work, grows up in his heart; and a new kind of fidelity—fidelity to feeling rather than to fact (if I may speak for the moment in the delusive language of dualism)—begins to weave itself into his artistic consciousness.

If there is any school in England in which fidelity to feeling has evolved itself out of fidelity to fact, that school is in the village of Utopia. Some ten or twelve years ago a decree went out from Whitehall that Drawing was to be taught in all the elementary schools in England. Egeria at once took the children into her confidence, and said to them: "You have now got to learn to draw: you don't know how to draw, and I don't know how to draw, but we must all set to work and see what we can do." A few years later the school was visited by the inspector to whose zeal as a prophet, and skill as an expositor and teacher, the transformation in the teaching of drawing which is gradually taking effect in all parts of the country, has been largely due. Here is the report[18] that he wrote after his visit—

"In this school the teaching of Drawing reaches the highest educational level I have hitherto met with in our elementary schools, and the results are the genuine expression of the children's own thoughts. Flat copies are not used, and the scholars evolve their own technique, for the Head Teacher is not strong herself in this respect. The development of thought carries with it the development of skill, and this is clearly seen in the children's drawings, which show good form and proportion, some knowledge of light and shade, a delicate and refined perception of colour, and a wonderful power of dealing with the difficulties of foreshortening. The central law is self-effort,—confidence and self-reliance follow. The spontaneous activities of the children are duly recognised, and the latter decide what to draw, how to draw it, and the materials to be used. One cannot remain long in the school without observing the absence of that timidity, that haunting fear of making a mistake, which paralyses the minds and bodies of so many of our children. Under the influence of the Head Teacher the children become acute critics. Her methods coincide so exactly with those which I have long been advocating, that I give them in her own words—

"'I gave each child an ivy-leaf and said, "Now look well at it." We talked about its peculiarities, looking at it all the time, and then I told them to draw one, still looking back to the leaf from time to time. Then I examined their drawings. A good many were, of course, faulty. In those cases I did not say, "No, you are wrong; this is the way," and go to the blackboard. I said, "In such and such a part is yours the same as the leaf? What is different? How can you alter it?" etc., etc. I make them tell me their faults. There was no blackboard demonstration.'

"From a careful examination of their work it is clear that the children have not only been taught to draw, but that they love and enjoy their drawing. Form and colour are not only seen, but understood and felt. The children are impelled by an irresistible desire to reach and express the truth, and are thus carried along an ever-moving path of educative action."

I have already spoken of the love of visible beauty which is a characteristic feature of the life of this school. It is in the drawing lesson that this love of beauty has in the main evolved itself. Other influences have no doubt been at work. Nature-study and literature, for example, have, as taught in this school, done much to foster the children's latent love of beauty; but had drawing never been taught, the influence of those subjects would have been much less effective than it has been. It is in the struggle to express what he perceives that the Utopian child has gradually strengthened and deepened his perceptive powers, till his sight has transformed itself into insight, and form and colour have come to be interpreted by him through the medium of the beauty which is behind them,—his feeling of beauty having, little by little, been awakened and evolved by his unceasing efforts to interpret the vraie verite of form and colour, which, as he now begins to learn, are beauty's outward self.

(4) The Musical Instinct.

In the development of the artistic sense the path of imitation is followed until it leads at last to heights which it cannot scale. The development of the musical sense takes from the first a widely different path. Nature has a beautiful music of her own, but the child seldom attempts to imitate this. Music belongs to the soul even more than to the outward world. So at least one feels disposed to think. But perhaps it is more correct to say that in the presence of music the provisional distinction between inward and outward, between the soul and the surrounding world, becomes wholly effaced. Expression is always the counterpart of perception; and we may rest assured that the deep, subtle, and elusive feelings to which music gives utterance have reality for their counterpart. The musician does not often reproduce in his compositions the audible sounds of the outward world,—the voices of animals, the songs of birds, the rustle of leaves, the murmur of the sea, the sighing of the breeze, the thunder of the storm. What he does reproduce is the music that awakes in his soul when the emotions which these sounds kindle begin to struggle for expression,—the music that is behind all the audible sounds, and perhaps also behind all the inaudible vibrations of Nature,—the music that is in his heart because it is also at the heart of Nature,—the rhythm of the Universe, as one may perhaps call it for lack of a fitter phrase. It is the sense of this rhythm which inspires the great Composer when he builds up his masterpieces. It is the sense of this rhythm which inspires the child when, in the joy of his heart, he breaks spontaneously into dance and song. To bring the rhythm of the Universe into the daily life of the child, to give free play to his instinctive sense of its all-pervading presence, is one of the highest functions of the teacher. And the more carefully the sense of rhythm is cultivated, the more does it tend to spiritualise itself, and the more profound and more vital is the life which it struggles to interpret and evolve. There is no instinct which is so deeply seated as the musical. It is possible for a child, it is possible for a whole class of children, to sing out of the depths of the soul; and when this happens we may be sure that a fountain of spiritual joy has been unsealed, and that a great and sacred mystery has been unveiled. There is a school in one of the poorest slums of a large town, in which, some two or three years ago, the children were taught to sing, and the teachers to teach singing, by an inspired "master" who believes that to lift the sluices of spiritual feeling is to quicken into ever-increasing activity its hidden springs; and neither the teachers nor the children have yet forgotten their lesson. The children are poor, pale, thin, unkempt, ill-clad, unlovely; but I am told that when they sing their faces are transfigured, and they all become beautiful.

Egeria is an accomplished musician, and though Utopia belongs to one of the unmusical counties of England, she has found it easy to awaken the musical instinct in the hearts of its children. A few years ago she introduced the old English Folk Songs and Morris Dances into the school. The children took to them at once as ducklings take to the water; and within a year they were able to give an admirably successful performance of some two dozen songs and dances in the village hall. Some of these had been rehearsed only once; but the children, thanks to their having been systematically trained to educate themselves, are so versatile and resourceful that every item on their programme was a complete success. The Folk Songs and Morris Dances are still the delight of the children. They are ever adding to their repertory of songs; and when they go into the playground for recreation, they at once form into small groups for Morris Dancing, the older children taking the little ones in hand, and initiating them into the pleasures of rhythmical movement.

There is another way in which Egeria brings music into the lives of the children. In her own words, she "sets many of their lessons to music." For example, when they are doing needlework or drawing or any other quiet lesson, she plays high-class music to them, which forms a background to their efforts and their thoughts, and which gradually weaves itself, on the one hand into the outward and visible work that they are doing, and on the other hand into the mysterious tissue of their inward life.

(5) The Inquisitive Instinct.

As the inquisitive instinct makes the child an intolerable nuisance to his ignorant and indolent elders, it is but natural that in the unenlightened school, as in the unenlightened home, it should be forcibly exterminated. It is through the agency of the formula "Don't speak till you are spoken to," that its destruction is usually effected. But under Egeria's aegis conversation in school hours is, as we have seen, freely encouraged, and the child's right to ask questions fully recognised; and one may therefore conjecture that this proscribed and outlawed instinct will find a safe asylum in her school. Whatever lesson may be in progress, the Utopian children are allowed, and even expected, to seek for illumination whenever they find themselves in the dark, to pause inquiringly at every obstacle to their understanding what they have seen or heard or read.

The encouragement which is given in Utopia to the child who seeks to gratify his desire for knowledge, is positive as well as negative. When the obstacles which education usually places in his path have been removed, it is found that the whole atmosphere of the school is favourable to the growth of his inquisitive instinct. At every turn he is called upon to plan and contrive, and is thus made to realise his own limitations, and to try to escape from them. Whatever he may have in hand,—be it the preparation for acting a new scene, or the interpretation of a new Folk Song or Morris Dance, or the invention of a new school game, or the thinking out some new way of treating a "subject,"—he is sure to find that knowledge is needed if he is to achieve success; and his desire for knowledge is therefore continually stimulated by the demands that his own initiative and activity are ever making upon him.

But it is in the "Nature lesson" that the inquisitive instinct finds in Utopia its freest scope and its fullest opportunity. To one who had persuaded himself of the innate stupidity of the average English child, a Nature lesson in Utopia would come as a revelation. He would learn for the first time that, far from being innately stupid, the average English child has it in him to reach a very high level of keenness, acuteness, and intellectual activity. Whenever a lesson is given on a natural object, e.g. a flower or a leaf, every child has a specimen and a lens. The object is then closely and carefully observed, in the hope of discovering features in it which might escape the unobservant. Whenever such features are discovered the children try to account for them. In these attempts they display much ingenuity and intelligence, and are led on by Egeria in the direction of the true explanation of each phenomenon, and the relation of this to what they know of the object as a whole, and of its meaning and function. The eagerness of the children to volunteer explanations of the facts that they observe is only equalled by the intelligence with which they grasp the general bearing of the problems that confront them, and the resourcefulness and quickness of wit with which they make repeated attempts to solve them.

And these are not the only qualities to which the Nature lesson gives free play. It is interesting to note that as on the one hand the inquisitive instinct is obviously near of kin to the communicative, so on the other hand it is ever tending to link itself to the artistic. The closeness of observation which is the basis of success in Nature-study, and by means of which the inquisitive instinct is fed and strengthened, is also the basis of success in drawing; and in each case it leads beyond itself into a region in which it has to be supplemented by, and even transfigured into, imagination, the faculty by means of which we observe what is at once impalpable and real.[19] And in that region the distinction between truth and beauty is ever tending to efface itself. The master sculptor is always an accomplished anatomist; and the genuine naturalist is a lover and admirer, as well as a student, of Nature. It has been well said that "to see things in their beauty is to see them in their truth"; and it is perhaps equally, though more remotely, true that to see things in their truth is to see them in their beauty. That being so, we need not wonder that among the Utopian children the love of what is beautiful in Nature has grown continuously with the growth of their interest in Nature-study, and that the inquisitive instinct is ever Reinforcing and being reinforced by the artistic.

(6) The Constructive Instinct.

Active, intelligent, resourceful, self-helpful, the Utopian child takes to handwork of various kinds as readily and almost as spontaneously as the birds in spring-time take to the work of nest-building. It must indeed be admitted that the systematic instruction in Gardening, Cookery, and Woodwork which warrants the payment of special grants for these "subjects" is not given. But informal gardening, informal cookery, and informal woodwork are vital features of the school life. Nor are the children's essays in handwork limited to these subjects. Whatever implement, instrument, or other contrivance may be needed in order to illustrate or otherwise help forward the general work of the school will be made by the children, so far as their technical ability and the resources of the school permit. For example, they will make fences, seats, frames, and sheds for their gardens, and "properties" and dresses for their dramatic performances. They will illustrate their games and lessons by means of simple modelling and paper-cutting. The older girls will dress dolls for the little ones to their own fancy, using their own discretion as regards material, style of dress, and method of dress-making. And so on.

But ready as the Utopian children are to use their hands, and clever as they are at using them, it is not through manual activity only that the development of their constructive instinct is carried on. One of the characteristic features of the school is the largeness of the scale on which the constructive powers of the children are encouraged to energise, and the frequency and variety of the demands that are made upon them. The Utopian child is expected to educate himself, not merely in the sense of doing by and for himself whatever task may be set him, but also in the sense of devising new tasks for himself, in thinking out new ways of treating the different subjects that appear on the school time-table, in taking thought for the whole scheme of his education. As the years go by, Egeria makes more and greater demands on the initiative and the intelligence of the children, her aim being apparently to transform the school by slow degrees into a self-governing community which, under her presidency, shall order its own life and work out its own salvation. This means, as I have lately pointed out, that at every turn the Utopian child is being called upon to plan and contrive; and this, again, means that his constructive instinct, with his inquisitive instinct as its other self, is being continually exercised on the widest possible field and under the most stimulating of all influences. The result of this is that reciprocal action is ever going on in his mind between the faculties that acquire knowledge and the faculties that apply it,—action which makes for the rapid and healthy growth of both sets of faculties, and which is therefore ever tending to strengthen the child's capacity for thinking and to raise the plane of its activity.

What is the culture of the child's expansive instincts likely to do for him?

I will weave into my answer to this question my knowledge of what has been done and is being done in Utopia.

It is through the medium of his own exertions that the evolution of the child's instincts is carried on by Egeria. It may be possible to lay veneers of information on the surface of a child's mind, but it is not possible to lay on veneers of growth; and growth, not information, is the end at which Egeria has always aimed. If a child is to grow, he must exercise his own limbs, his own organs, his own faculties. No one else can do this for him; and unless he does it himself, it will never be done. The school life in Utopia is therefore one of constant activity. The habit of doing things, of doing things for himself, of doing things by himself, is gradually built up in each child. There is no forced inertness in Utopia, no slackness, no boredom, no yawning. And the activity which is characteristic of the school is always the child's own activity. The child himself is behind everything that he does. The child himself is expressing himself in his every action. Mechanical activity, the doing of things, not merely at the bidding of another, but also under his minutely detailed direction, is as foreign to the genius of the school as is the passivity of the helpless victims of the unenlightened teacher's "chalk and talk."

The first consequence, then, of the training of the expansive instincts which is given in Utopia is the building up in each scholar of what I may call the habit of rational activity. In many schools the energies of the child are systematically dammed back, till at last the springs of his activity, finding that no demand is made upon them, cease to flow. In Utopia the sluices, though always regulated, are permanently lifted, and the energies of the child are ever moving, with a strong and steady current, in whatever channel they may have chanced to enter. So strong, indeed, and so steady is the current that it maintains its movement long after the child has left school. The employers of labour in the neighbourhood of Utopia will tell you that there are no slackers or loafers in the yearly output of the school. Egeria recently received a visit from one of her ex-pupils, a girl of fourteen who is at home keeping house for her father, and who said to her in the course of their conversation: "I do just love washing days; I get up before six and start. Then, when all the washing is done, I scrub everything bright in the copper while I have the hot soapsuds." Accustomed as he (or she) is from his (or her) earliest days to sincere and fearless self-expression, the Utopian child is entirely incapable of indulging in cant; and the genuineness of the sentiment which dictated those words is therefore above suspicion. To work vigorously, to do well whatever he (or she) has to do, is a real pleasure to the Utopian child. Indeed his whole being is a living response to the familiar precept: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."

And what he does with his might is always well worth doing. His constant effort to express himself has, as its necessary counterpart, a constant effort to find out what is worth expressing, to get to the truth of things, to see things as they are. The consequent growth of his perceptive powers may be looked at from two points of view. On the one hand his growing capacity for getting on terms with things—for feeling his way among them, for "getting, the hang" of them, for making himself at home with them, for learning their ins and outs, for understanding their ways and works—will give him the power of putting forth an appropriate sense in response to the demands of each new environment, and, through the medium of this sense, of converting information into knowledge. For this reason new "subjects" have no terror for Egeria and her pupils. Though she has never thought in subjects, she is ready to extend her curriculum in any direction in which she thinks that her children are likely to find interest or profit. The versatility, the mental agility, of the children is as remarkable as their activity. The current of their energy is ready to adapt itself to every modifying influence, to every change of geological formation, that it may encounter in its course, and to shape its channel or channels accordingly.

On the other hand, as healthy vigorous growth is always upward (and downward) as well as outward, the lateral extension of the child's perceptive powers must needs be balanced in Utopia by the gradual elevation of his standpoint, with a corresponding widening of his outlook, and the proportionate deepening of his insight. When the school life of the child is one of continuous self-expression, opportunities for "putting his soul" into what he says and does will often present themselves to him; and if only a few of these are made use of, his outlook on life will widen, and his imaginative sympathy with life will deepen, to an extent which to one who had never visited Utopia might well seem incredible. I have spoken of the Utopian child's love of the beautiful. This is one aspect of the spiritual growth that he is always making. Other aspects of it are his strong sympathy with life in all its forms, and a certain large and free way of looking at things, which, as far as my experience of school children goes, is all his own.

There is yet another aspect of his spiritual growth which is perhaps the most vital and the most typical of all. When we say that the child is growing both laterally and vertically (like a shapely tree), we mean that he is growing as a whole, as a living soul. Now the growth of the soul as such must needs take the form of outgrowth, of escape from "self." Growth is, in its essence, an emancipative process; and though it sometimes intensifies selfishness and widens the sphere of its activity, that is invariably due to its being one-sided and therefore inharmonious and unhealthy. When the child or the man is growing as a living whole, with a happy, harmonious, many-sided growth, his growth is of necessity outgrowth, and he must needs be escaping from the thraldom of his lower and lesser self. This conclusion is no mere inference from accepted or postulated premises. What I have seen in Utopia has forced it upon me. The unselfishness, the natural, easy, spontaneous self-forgetfulness, of the Utopian child, is the central feature of his moral life,—so marked and withal so unique a feature that its presence proves to demonstration, first, that growth of the right sort is necessarily emancipative, and, next, that the growth made in Utopia is growth of the right sort. I have already commented on the singular charm of manner which distinguishes the children of Utopia. Their self-forgetfulness, their entire lack of self-consciousness, is one source of this charm. The tactfulness which their life of self-expression, and therefore of trained perception, tends to engender, is another. But the moral aspect of Utopianism is one of such surpassing interest, and also of such profound significance from the point of view of my fundamental "truism," that I must limit myself for the moment to this passing reference to it, and reserve it for fuller treatment in the remaining chapters.

I could easily make a long list of Utopian virtues and graces, but I must content myself with touching on one more typical product of Egeria's philosophy of education,—the joy which the children wear in their faces and bear in their hearts. The sense of well-being which must needs accompany healthy and harmonious growth is realised by him who experiences it as joy. The Utopian children are by many degrees the happiest that I have met with in an elementary school, and I must therefore conclude that all is well with them, that their well-being—the true end of all education—has been, and is being, achieved. If you look at any of them with more than a mere passing glance, you will be sure to win from him the quick response of a sunny smile,—a smile which is half gladness, half goodwill. And the joy of their hearts goes with them when their schooldays are over and they begin to work for their bread. Last year one of the boys, on leaving school, found employment in a large field on the lower slopes of the hills, where he had to collect flints and pile them in heaps, his wage for this dull and tiresome work being no more than fivepence a day. But he found the work neither dull nor tiresome; for as he marched up and down the field, collecting and piling the flints with cheery goodwill, he sang his Folk Songs with all the spontaneous happiness of a soaring lark.

Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a wide and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,—these are qualities which might be expected to unfold themselves under the influence of the Utopian training, and which do, in point of fact, flourish vigorously in the soil and atmosphere of Utopia. They are the outcome of a type of education which differs radically from that which has hitherto been accepted as orthodox,—differing from it with the unfathomable difference between vital and mechanical obedience, between life and machinery.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The child is struggling to do this, and more than this. The search for order resolves itself into the search for cause; and the search for cause will resolve itself, in the last resort, into the greatest of all adventures,—the search for that pure essence of things on which all the deeper desires of the soul converge, which imagination dreams of as absolute beauty, and reason as a beacon-lamp of all-illuminating light, flashing forth alternately as absolute reality and absolute truth.

[17] I shall perhaps be told that my extravagant idealism is out of place in a book on elementary education. To this possible reproach I can but answer, in Mrs. Browning's words, that—

It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off The dust of the actual.

My experience of Utopia has convinced me that in taking thought for the education of the young it is impossible to be too idealistic, and that the more "commonsensical" and "utilitarian" one's philosophy of education, the shallower and falser it will prove to be.

[18] An informal report to me, not a formal report to the Board of Education.

[19] Real, in the sense that the beauty of form and colour is more real than either form or colour, and that a law of Nature is more real than an isolated fact.



CHAPTER V

EDUCATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION

Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,—are there many schools in England in which the soil and atmosphere are favourable to the vigorous growth of all these qualities? I doubt it. In the secondary schools, of all grades and types, the education given is so one-sided, thanks to the inexorable pressure of the scholarship system, that the harmonious development of the child's nature is not to be looked for. In the elementary schools, from which the chilling shadow cast by thirty years of "payment by results" is passing slowly—very slowly—away, the instinct of the teacher is to distrust the child and do everything, or nearly everything, for him, the result being that the whole regime is still unfavourable to the spontaneous outgrowth of the child's higher qualities. There are of course schools, both secondary and elementary, in which one or more of the Utopian qualities flourish with considerable vigour. There are elementary schools, for example, in which the children, being allowed by enterprising teachers to walk in new paths without leading strings, have become unexpectedly active and versatile. And there are others—mostly in the slum regions of great towns—in which the devotion, the sympathetic kindness, and the gracious bearing of the teachers have won from the children the response of unselfish affection, attractive manners, and happy faces.[20] Yet even in these exceptional cases it may be doubted if the development of the particular quality or qualities for which the school is distinguished reaches the high-water mark which is reached in each and all of the seven qualities in Utopia. As for the elementary schools which remain faithful, as so many still do, to the traditions of the old regime,—if in these any of the seven qualities manage to resist the adverse influences to which they are all exposed, they have at best but a starved and stunted life.

I have spoken much and with unsparing frankness of the shortcomings of our elementary schools. The time has come for me to say with emphasis that however grave and however numerous may be the defects of elementary education in England, they are defects which it shares with all other branches of education, and which England shares with all other Western lands. The plain truth is that education as such is a failure in the West, a failure in the sense that the very qualities which it ought to foster—the cardinal virtues, mental, moral, and spiritual, which are present in embryo in every child, waiting to be realised—are not merely neglected by it, in its insane ardour for "results," but are also exposed, in most of its schools, to strongly adverse influences. And the reason why education as such is a failure in the West is that from its earliest days it has been a house divided against itself, those who were and are responsible for it having been under the influence of two mutually destructive assumptions, which they have vainly tried to reconcile with one another.

The first of these assumptions is my initial "truism,"—that the function of education is to foster growth. This is admitted, implicitly if not directly, by all who think and speak about education, and even, in their unguarded moments, by most of those who teach. It is generally admitted, for example, that such mental qualities as attention, memory, judgment, intelligence, reason, such moral qualities as loyalty, courage, truthfulness, kindness, unselfishness, such semi-moral qualities as cleanliness, orderliness, carefulness, alertness, industry, punctuality, are capable of being developed by education. It is further admitted that such special qualities as literary or artistic taste, the mathematical or the historical sense, an aptitude for business or finance, are ready to evolve themselves, in response to the fostering influence of practical experience directed by skilful teaching. It is admitted, in other words, that there is much in human nature, apart from what is purely or mainly physical, which is both capable and worthy of cultivation, and which education ought therefore to try to cultivate.

So far, so good. These admissions, with the fundamental admission which underlies them all, might form the basis of a sound philosophy of education, if they were not liable to be stultified and even nullified by the counter assumption that human nature is innately evil and corrupt. For from the latter assumption has followed, both logically and naturally, a theory of education which is not merely unfavourable but fatal to growth. If human nature is innately evil, if it has no inborn capacity for goodness or truth, what is there in it that is worth training? So far as the "great matters" of life are concerned, the child must be educated by being told in minute detail what to do, and by being alternately bribed and bullied into doing it. As he can neither think, nor believe, nor desire, nor do what is right, he must be told what to think, what to believe, what to desire, what to do; and as it is assumed that the tasks set him by his teacher will not be intrinsically attractive, he must be induced to perform them by the threat of external punishments and the promise of external rewards. In other words, in the spheres of religion and morals, so far as these can be walled off from the rest of human life, he must be educated, not by being helped to grow, but by being compelled to obey; and as the spheres of religion and morals cannot possibly be walled off from the rest of human life, the idea of educating the child through the medium of passive and mechanical obedience will gradually extend its influence over all the other departments and aspects of his home and school life, his innate sinfulness finding its equivalent, in secular matters, in his innate helplessness and stupidity, while in the place of the creeds, codes, and catechisms by which his spiritual welfare is provided for, he will be fed during the hours of secular instruction on rations of information, formulated rules, and minute directions of various kinds. Under this regime of wire-pulling on the part of the teacher and puppet-like dancing on the part of the child, the growth of the child's faculties,—of the whole range of his faculties, for they will all come under the blighting influence of the current misconception of the bent of his nature and the consequent under-estimate of his powers,—far from being fostered, will be systematically thwarted and starved. This is the fate which might be expected to befall the child if the doctrine of his innate sinfulness were allowed to dominate his education; and this is the fate which has befallen and is befalling him in all grades of society and in all the countries of the West.

It is the doctrine of original sin, of the congenital depravity of man's nature, which blocks the way to the reform of education,—blocks the way to it by compelling education to become the destroying angel instead of the foster-nurse of the child's expanding life. In criticising the defects of our educational system, we have too long mistaken symptoms for causes, and believed that we were removing the latter when we were only palliating or at best excising the former. To pinch off a withered bud, to lop off a withered limb, of the diseased tree of education, to train in this or that direction a branch which is as yet unaffected, is but lost labour so long as the tree is being slowly poisoned at its roots by a fundamental misconception of the character and capacity of the child. It is time that we should reconsider our whole attitude towards human nature. The widespread belief that sundry faculties, physical, mental, and moral, admit of being cultivated and ought to be cultivated in the schoolroom—a belief which is ever affirming itself against the educational systems and practices that are ever giving it the lie—may surely be construed into an admission that my primary truism is at least a truth. If this is so, if the business of the teacher is, as I contend, to help the child to grow, healthily, vigorously, and symmetrically, on all the planes of his being, the inference is irresistible that education will achieve nothing but failure until its foundations have been entirely relaid. For faith in the inherent soundness, in the natural goodness, of the seed or sapling, or whatever else he may undertake to rear, is the first condition of success on the part of the grower. And to ask education to bring to sane and healthy maturity the plant which we call human nature, and in the same breath to tell it that human nature is intrinsically corrupt and evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. One might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of wheat. Growth can and does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. A poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant; and the more carefully it is fed and tended, the larger and stronger will the poisonous plant become.

The time has come, then, for us to throw to the winds the time-honoured, but otherwise dishonoured and discredited, belief that the child is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, and that therefore his nature, if allowed to obey its own laws and follow its own tendencies, will ripen into death, instead of into a larger and richer life. I shall perhaps be told that if this belief is abandoned, other religious beliefs will go with it. Let them go. They have kept bad company, and if they cannot dissociate themselves from it, they had better share its fate. What is real and vital in our religious beliefs will gain incalculably by being disengaged from what may once have had a life and a meaning of its own but is now nothing better than a morbid growth. To tell a man that, apart from a miracle, he is predestined to perdition, is the surest way to send him there; and it is probable that the doctrine of his own innate depravity is the deadliest instrument for achieving his ruin, that Man, in his groping endeavours to explain to himself the dominant facts of his existence, has ever devised.

Nor is the practical failure of the doctrine—its failure to achieve any lasting result but the strangulation of Man's expanding life—the only proof that it is inherently unsound. There is positive proof that the counter doctrine, the doctrine of Man's potential goodness, is inherently true. We have seen that the great arterial instincts which manifest themselves in the undirected play of young children, are making for three supreme ends,—the sympathetic instincts for the goal of Love, the artistic instincts for the goal of Beauty, the scientific instincts for the goal of Truth. We have seen, in other words, that the push of Nature's forces in the inner life of the young child is ever tending to take him out of himself in the direction of a triune goal which I may surely be allowed to call Divine. If we follow towards "infinity" the lines of love, of beauty, and of truth, we shall begin at last to dream of an ideal point—the meeting-point of all and the vanishing-point of each—for which no name will suffice less pregnant with meaning or less suggestive of reality than that of God. It is towards God, then, not towards the Devil, that the ripening, expansive forces of Nature which are at work in the child, are directing the process of his growth. We are taught that Man is by nature a "child of wrath." The more closely we study his ways and works when, as a young child, he is left (more or less) to his own devices, the stronger does our conviction become that he is by nature a "child of God." Those who are in a position to speak tell us that the normal child is born physically healthy. If the men of science would study the other sides of his being as carefully as they have studied his physique, they would, I feel sure, be able to tell us that he is also born mentally, morally, and spiritually healthy, and that on these sides, as well as on the physical side, his growth might be and ought to be a natural movement towards perfection. For some of my readers such arguments as these are perhaps too much in the air to be convincing. Well, then, let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the children—the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion—is one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign to Egeria's conception of education. How, then, has the emancipation of the child from the first enemy of Man's well-being—from all those narrowing, hardening, and demoralising influences which we speak of collectively as egoistic or selfish—been effected in Utopia? By no other means than that of allowing the child's nature to unfold itself, on many sides of its being and under thoroughly favourable conditions. The twofold desire which we all experience,—to accept and rest in the ordinary undeveloped self, and at the same time to exalt and magnify it,—is the surest and most fruitful source of moral evil. Indeed, it may be doubted if there is any source of moral evil, apart from those which are purely sensual, which has not at least an underground connection with this. If we are to "cap" this deadly fountain, and so prevent it from desolating human life, we must realise, once and for all, that the two desires which master us cannot be simultaneously gratified; that we cannot both rest in the ordinary self and magnify it; that we can magnify it only by making it great, by helping it to grow. When we have realised this, we shall be ready to receive the further lesson that in proportion as the self magnifies itself by the natural process of growth, so does its desire to magnify itself gradually die away,—die away with the dawning consciousness that in and through the process of its growth it is outgrowing itself, forgetting itself, escaping from itself, that the thing which so ardently desired to be magnified is in fact ceasing to be. This vital truth,—which my visits to Utopia have borne in upon me,—that healthy and harmonious growth is in its very essence outgrowth or escape from self, has depths of meaning which are waiting to be fathomed. For one thing, it means, if it has any meaning, that what is central in human nature is, not its inborn wickedness but its infinite capacity for good, not its rebellious instincts and backsliding tendencies but its many-sided effort to achieve perfection.

We must now make our choice between two alternatives. We must decide, once and for all, whether the function of education is to foster growth or to exact mechanical obedience. If we choose the latter alternative, we shall enter a path which leads in the direction of spiritual death. If we choose the former, we must cease to halt between two opinions, and must henceforth base our system of education, boldly and confidently, on the conviction that growth is in its essence a movement towards perfection, and therefore that self-realisation is the first and last duty of Man.

It is by answering possible objections to Utopianism that I shall best be able to unfold Egeria's philosophy of education. I shall perhaps be told that in my advocacy of that philosophy I am preaching dangerous doctrines; that the only alternative for obedience is the lawlessness of unbridled licence; and that anarchy, social, moral, and spiritual, is the ultimate goal of the path which I am urging the teacher to enter. Let me point out, in answer to this protest, that it is mechanical obedience which I condemn, not obedience as such. If I condemn mechanical obedience, I do so because it is unworthy of the name of obedience, because the higher faculties of Man's being, the faculties which are distinctively human—reason, imagination, aspiration, spiritual intuition, and the like—take no part in it, because it is the obedience of an automaton, not of a living soul. What I wish to oppose to it is vital obedience, obedience to the master laws of Man's being, obedience to the laws which assert themselves as central and supreme, obedience more particularly to those larger and obscurer laws which obedience itself helps us to discover, obedience in fine to that hierarchy of laws—(the superior law always claiming the fuller measure and the higher kind of obedience)—which, if we are to use the Divine Name, we must needs identify with the will of God. Obedience, in this sense of the word, is a sustained and soul-deep effort in which all the higher faculties of Man's being take part, an effort which is in some sort a voyage of discovery, the doing of the more obvious duty being always rewarded by the deepening of the doer's insight and the widening of his outlook, and by the consequent unveiling to him of the way in which he is to walk and the goal at which he is to aim. That the path of soul-growth is the path of vital obedience can scarcely be doubted. The effort to grow is always successful just so far as it implies knowledge of the laws of the nature that is unfolding itself, and readiness to obey those laws; and so far as it is successful, it carries with it the outgrowth of the very faculties by which knowledge—the higher knowledge which makes further growth possible—is to be gained. Here, as elsewhere, there is an unceasing interaction between perception and expression, between knowledge of law and obedience to law, what is given as obedience being received back as enlightenment, and what is received as enlightenment being given back as larger, fuller, and more significant obedience.

And, be it carefully observed, it is obedience to the laws of human nature, not obedience to the idiosyncrasies of the individual nature, which the process of soul-growth at once implies and makes possible. Growth is, in its essence, a movement towards that perfect type which is the real self of each individual in turn, and the approach to which involves the gradual surrender of individuality, and the gradual escape from the ordinary self. A man is to cling to and affirm his individuality, not in order that he may rest in it and make much of it, but in order that he may outgrow it and pass far beyond it in that one way—the best way for him—which it, and it alone, is able to mark out for him. In other words, he is to assert his individual self in order that he may universalise himself in his own way, and not in obedience to the ruling of custom and authority, in order that he may escape from himself through the real outlet of sincere self-expression, and not through the sham outlet of hypocrisy and cant.

What I may call the Utopian scheme of education, far from making for antinomianism and anarchy, is the sworn enemy of individualism and therefore, a fortiori, of everything that savours of licence. It is the conventional type of education, with its demands for mechanical obedience to external authority, which leads through despotism to social and political chaos. The whole regime of mechanical obedience is favourable, in the long run, to the development of anarchy. Let us take the case of a church or an autocracy which demands implicit obedience from its subjects, and is prepared to exact such obedience by the application of physical force or its moral equivalent. What will happen to it when its subjects begin to ask it for its credentials? The fact that it has always demanded from them literal rather than spiritual obedience, and that, in its application of motive force, it has appealed to their baser desires and baser fears, makes it impossible for it to justify itself to their higher faculties, rational or emotional, and makes it necessary for it to meet their incipient criticism with renewed threats of punishment and renewed promises of reward. But the very fact that it is being asked for its credentials means that the force on which it has hitherto relied is weakening, that its power to punish and reward, which has always been resolvable into the power to make people believe that it can punish and reward, is being called in question and is therefore crumbling away. And behind that power there is nothing but chaos. For the regime of mechanical obedience, by arresting the spontaneous growth of Man's higher nature, and by making its chief appeal to his baser desires and baser fears, becomes of necessity the foster-mother of egoism; and when egoism, which makes each man a law to himself and the potential enemy of his kind, is unrestrained by authority, the door is thrown wide open to anarchy, and through anarchy to chaos. This is what is happening in the West, in our self-conscious and critical age. In every field of human action, in religion, in politics, in social life, in art, in letters, authority is being asked for its credentials; and as this demand, besides being a disintegrating influence, is a sign that the force on which authority relies is weakening, it is not to be wondered at that there is a steady drift in many Western countries in the direction of anarchy,—religious, political, social, artistic, literary,—or that this regime of incipient anarchy is taking the form of an ignoble scramble for wealth, for power, for position, for fame, for notoriety, for anything in fine which may serve to exalt a man above his fellows, and so minister to the aggrandizement of his lower self.

In this drift towards anarchy the school is playing its part. I do not wish to suggest that the boys and girls of this or any other Western country are beginning to ask their teachers for their credentials, or are likely to rise in rebellion against them. The preparation for anarchy that is going on in the school is not only quite compatible with what is known as "strict discipline," but is also, in part at least, the effect of it. What is happening is that in an acutely critical age the regime of mechanical obedience to external authority which has been in force in the West for nearly 2000 years, and which is now taking its victims straight towards anarchy, is being carefully rehearsed in our schools of all types and grades. During the years when human nature is most pliable (owing to its richness in sap), most easily trained, and most amenable to influence, good or evil, the child's spontaneous effort to outgrow himself and so escape from his lower self,—an end which is not to be reached except by the path of free self-expression,—is persistently thwarted till at last it dies away; blind and literal obedience to external authority, for which the consent of his higher faculties is not asked, and in the giving of which they are not allowed to take part, is persistently exacted from him till at last his higher faculties cease to energise, and his lower nature begins to monopolise the rising sap of his life; in order to enforce the blind obedience that is asked for, an appeal is made, by an elaborate system of external rewards and external punishments, to his selfish desires and ignoble fears; while the examination system, with its inevitable accompaniments of prizes and class-lists, makes a special appeal to his competitive instincts,—instincts which are anti-social, and may even, in extreme cases, become anti-human in their tendency. And when authority has thus been presented to him, in a form which he has never been expected to welcome, and when, by the same process, the growth of his higher self has been arrested, and his anarchical instincts—his selfishness and self-assertion—have been systematically cultivated, the critical spirit and temper will be deliberately aroused in him, especially if he happens to attend one of those secondary schools which are regarded as highly efficient because their lists of University distinctions and other "successes" are inordinately long; for the education given to him in such a school by his scholarship-hunting teachers is of necessity so bookish and so one-sided that his intellectual, dialectically critical faculties are apt to become hypertrophied, while other faculties which might have kept these in check are neglected and starved. The product of such a system of education,—benumbed or paralysed on many sides of his being by the repressive regime to which he has so long been subjected, but vigorously alive on the sides of egoism and intellectual criticism,—will be an anarchist in posse (unless, indeed, his vitality has been depressed by his school-life below the point at which reaction becomes possible);—an anarchist in posse, even though, in his terror of anarchism in others, he should become a pillar of the Established Church of his country, a J.P. of his town or county, and an active member of the nearest Conservative Association.

In Utopia, on the other hand, where selfishness is outgrown and forgotten, and where the spirit of comradeship and brotherhood pervades the school, there can be no preparation for anarchy, if only for the reason that there is no authority—no despotic authority, forcibly imposing its will on the school ab extra—to be potentially dethroned. For all her scholars, Egeria is the very symbol and embodiment of love, the centre whence all happy, harmonious, life-giving, peace-diffusing influences radiate, and to which, when they have vitalised the souls of the children and transformed themselves into sentiments of loyalty and devotion, they all return. I am not exaggerating a whit when I say that the Utopian school is an ideal community, a community whose social system, instead of being inspired by that spirit of "competitive selfishness" which makes "each for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" its motto, seems to have realised the Socialistic dream of "Each for all, and all for each."

I shall perhaps be asked what provision is made in Utopia for enabling the children to go through the drudgery of school-life, to master the "3 R's," to "get up" the various subjects which the Code prescribes, and so forth. To this question there is but one answer: the best possible provision. "Qui veut la fin veut les moyens." In the life of organised play which the children lead, attractive ends are ever being set before them. If they are to achieve these ends, they must take the appropriate means. What children in other schools might regard as drudgery, the Utopian takes in his stride. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are means to ends beyond themselves, ends which are constantly presenting themselves to the Utopian. If he is to gratify his communicative instinct, he must learn to read and write. If he is to gratify his dramatic instinct, he must, inter alia, read with intelligence books of reference which would be considered too advanced for the ordinary school-child. If he is to gratify his inquisitive and constructive instincts, he must learn to count, measure, and calculate. For whatever means may have to be taken, must be taken by him. Egeria, as he knows well, will do nothing for him which he can reasonably be expected to do for himself. There are subjects, such as drawing, dancing, and singing, which are, or at any rate ought to be, intrinsically delightful, as being natural channels of self-expression. There are other subjects, such as history, geography, and English, which can be made delightful by being treated dramatically. The word "drudgery" has no meaning for the Utopian child. A group of children in the highest class recently committed to memory the whole "Trial Scene" of the Merchant of Venice—some 300 lines or so of blank verse—in order that they might give themselves the pleasure of acting it. They accomplished this feat in a little more than a month. In the ordinary elementary school the child who has committed 150 lines to memory in the course of a year has done all that is required of him. The getting up of a subject is drudgery only when the child can see no meaning in what he is doing, only when the getting up of the subject is regarded as an end in itself. In Utopia no subject, apart from those which I have spoken of as intrinsically delightful, is taught for its own sake. Subjects are taught there either as the means to desired ends, or because they afford opportunities for the training of the expansive instincts, the gratification of which is a pure pleasure to every healthy child.

But not only does the Utopian child, with his eyes always fixed on desirable ends, find a pleasure in doing things which other children are wont to regard as drudgery, but he has the further advantage of being able to master with comparative facility what other children find difficult as well as distasteful. From first to last, the training given in Utopia makes, as we have seen, for the development of faculty. In my last chapter I set forth in detail some of the ways and means by which Egeria tries to cultivate the expansive instincts of her pupils. Behind all these ways and means stands the master method—or shall I say the master principle?—of self-expression. Recognising, as she does, that each of the expansive instincts is a definite expression of the soul's spontaneous effort to grow, and a clear indication of a particular direction in which Nature wishes the soul to grow,—and recognising, as she also does, that the business of growing must be done by the growing organism and cannot be delegated to any one else,—Egeria entrusts the work of self-realisation to the child himself, and makes no attempt to relieve him of an obligation which no one but himself can discharge.

Now self-realisation is a twofold process. In the absence of a fitter and more adequate word, I have applied the term perceptive to those faculties by means of which we lay hold upon the world that surrounds us, and draw it into ourselves and make it our own. And I have contended that this group of faculties has, as its counterpart and correlate, another group of faculties which I have called expressive,—the faculties by means of which we go out of ourselves into the world that surrounds us, and give ourselves to it and try to identify ourselves with it,—and that the relation between these two groups is so vital and so intimate that each in turn may be regarded as the very life and soul of the other. In words which I have already used, the perceptive faculties, at any rate in childhood, grow through the interpretation which expression gives them, and in no other way, and the expressive faculties grow by interpreting perception, and in no other way. That these two groups of faculties are, as it were, the reciprocating engines by means of which the vital movement which we call self-realisation is effected, is the conviction on which Egeria's whole scheme of education may be said to be pivoted. In Utopia self-expression is the medium through which the expansive instincts are encouraged to unfold themselves. And this life of self-expression has as its necessary counterpart the continuous development of the perceptive faculties along the whole range of the child's nature.

Hence the all-round capacity of the Utopian child. The development of his perceptive faculties which his life of self-expression tends to produce, takes many forms. One of these, and one which in some sort underlies and interpenetrates all the rest, is the outgrowth of what I may call the intuitional faculty,—a general capacity for getting into touch with any new environment in which the child may find himself, of subconsciously apprehending its laws and properties, of feeling his way through its unexplored land. It is by means of this capacity for putting forth a new sense in response to the stimulus of each new environment, that the Utopian child is able to master with comparative ease the various subjects which he is expected to learn. And not with ease only, but with effect. It is, as we have seen, through the action of an appropriate sense, and in no other way, that the information which is supplied to the scholar, when he is learning this or that subject, is converted into knowledge, and is so made available both for the further understanding of the given subject and for the nutrition of the scholar's own inner life.

From every point of view, then, the Utopian scholar has a marked advantage, in respect of the things with which education is supposed to be mainly concerned—the mastery of subjects and the acquisition of knowledge—over the product of the conventional type of school. Whatever the Utopian may have to learn, is a pleasure to him either for its own sake or as a means to some desirable end. Whatever he may have to learn, he learns with comparative ease, because his perceptive faculties have been systematically trained, and he is therefore at home, in greater or lesser degree, in any new environment. And whatever he may have to learn, he learns with effect, because he is able to digest the information that he receives, and convert it into knowledge, and so retain it in the form in which it will best conduce both to his further progress in that particular branch of study and to the general building up of his mind.

In the ordinary result-hunting school the scholar fares very differently from this. As a rule, he takes but little pleasure in his work, for subjects which have their chief value as means to desirable ends are presented to him as ends in themselves, and as such are rightly regarded by him as meaningless and therefore as intolerably dull; while subjects which are either intrinsically attractive, as being natural channels of self-expression, or potentially attractive as providing opportunities for self-expression, have no attraction for him, as in neither case is self-expression on his part permitted. Again, he finds great difficulty in mastering the subjects on his time-table, or even in making the first step towards mastering them, for, owing to his perceptive faculties as a whole having been starved by the repressive regime which denied them the outlet of expression, he has not evolved the power of putting forth an appropriate sense in response to the stimulus of a new environment, and is therefore helpless in the presence of what is unfamiliar or unexpected. One of his faculties, his memory, has indeed been hypertrophied by being unduly exercised, and his capacity for receiving information is in consequence unhealthily great; but because he lacks, in this case or in that, the sense which might enable him to digest the information received and convert it into knowledge, the food with which he has been crammed speedily passes through him, undigested and unassimilated, and the hours which he has spent in acquiring information will have done as little for his progress in the given subject as for the general growth of his mind.

The difference between the two schemes of education—that which exacts mechanical obedience, and that which seeks to foster growth—may be looked at from another point of view. Under the former, interference with what I may call the subconscious processes of Nature is at its maximum. Under the latter, at its minimum. In order to realise what this means let us suppose that such interference were possible where fortunately it is and must ever be impossible,—in the first and second years of the child's life. Fortunately for the child, it is impossible for us to educate him, in any formal sense of the word, until he has mastered his mother tongue. Were it otherwise, his mother tongue would never be mastered. Before he reaches the age of two the child accomplishes the marvellous feat of acquiring an entirely new language. While he is learning it Nature is his only teacher, and under her tuition he masters the new language without the least strain and with complete success. But let us suppose that it was possible for a teacher of the conventional type to give minute directions to a child by some other medium of expression than that of language. And let us suppose that such a teacher made up her mind that she, and not Nature, was to teach the child his mother tongue. One can readily imagine what would happen. The teacher would probably have a theory that no child should begin to talk till he was two or even two and a half years old; and if so, the child would be kept in a state of enforced dumbness till he reached that age. In any case, he would be strictly forbidden to speak till his teacher gave him formal permission to do so. Half-an-hour in the morning, and half-an-hour in the afternoon would probably be set aside for the language lesson. For so many weeks or months the child would be strictly limited to words of two or three letters. For so many more weeks or months, to words of four or five letters. Things which had names of more than the prescribed number of letters would be kept away from the child; or, if that was impossible, he would not be allowed to talk about them. For half a year perhaps he would be limited to the use of nouns and verbs. Prepositions might then be introduced into his vocabulary; and, later, adjectives and adverbs. And so on; and so on. And the outcome of all this elaborate training would be that the child would never learn to talk his mother tongue.

It is by methods analogous in all respects to this that many of the subjects on the time-table are taught in thousands of our schools. The teacher seems to imagine that he knows, fully and precisely, how each subject ought to be taught; and instead of standing aside, and trying to learn how Nature wishes this or that subject to be taught (if Nature can be said to take any interest in "subjects"), and then trying to co-operate with her subconscious tendencies, he makes out his elaborate scheme of instruction, sets before the child as the goal of his efforts the production of certain formal results, and drives him towards these with whip and bridle, satisfied that if he succeeds in producing them, the subject will have been duly mastered. And all the time he will not have given a thought to what is happening to the child's inner life. Yet it is more than probable that the teacher's disregard of, and therefore incessant interference with, the subconscious processes of Nature has quite as disastrous results in the teaching of composition, let us say, or drawing, as it would certainly have in the hypothetical case of the teaching of the child's mother tongue.

But in truth the Utopian conception of what constitutes efficiency differs so radically from the current conception, that little is to be gained by comparing them. If I am asked by those who value outward and visible results for their own sake, whether the training given in Utopia is "efficient," I can but answer: "Yes, but efficient in a sense which you cannot even begin to understand,—efficient in the sense of developing faculty and fostering life, whereas the price paid for your boasted efficiency is the starvation of faculty and the destruction of life."

* * * * *

"But how," it will be asked, "are the Utopian children, one and all, induced to exert themselves? The standard of activity in the school is, on your own showing, exceptionally high. Much is expected of the children. Yet there are no rewards for them to hope for, and no punishments for them to fear. How, then, are those who are by nature less energetic or less persevering than the rest to be induced to rise to the level of the teacher's expectation?" By implication this question has been answered again and again. But it deserves a direct answer, and I will try to give it one.

To begin with, it is incorrect to say that there are no rewards or punishments in Utopia. Outward rewards and outward punishments are entirely unknown there; but there are inward rewards to be had for the seeking, and there are inward punishments to be feared, though it must be admitted that the fear of them seldom overshadows, even for a passing moment, the sunlit life of the Utopian child. What induces the Utopian child to work is, in brief, delight in his work. He is allowed and even encouraged to energise along the lines which his nature seems to have marked out for him, and in response to the stress of forces which seem to be welling up from the depths of his inner life. Exertion of this kind is in itself a delight. Nature has taken care to make all the exercises by which growth is fostered, at any rate in the days of childhood when growth is most rapid and vigorous, intrinsically attractive. Had she done otherwise she would have failed to make due provision for the growth of Man's being during the years which precede the outgrowth of self-consciousness, and the possibility of self-discipline, of the narrower and sterner kind.

And not only are the exercises by which healthy and harmonious growth is secured intrinsically attractive, but also the sense of well-being which accompanies such growth is an unfailing source of happiness. In Utopia the end for which the children are working is not an external reward or prize to be conferred on them if they achieve certain prescribed results, but rather the actual goal to which the path that they have entered is taking them,—a goal which is ever lighting the path with its foreglow, and which is therefore at once an infinitely distant lodestar and an ever present delight. For the consummation of any process of growth is always the perfection, the final well-being, of the thing that grows; and therefore in each successive stage of the process there is a truer prefigurement of the perfection which is being gradually achieved, and a fuller sense of that well-being which, at its highest level, is perfection's other self.

For the Utopian, then, to walk in the path of self-realisation is its own reward; and to wander from that path is its own punishment. But as the forces of Nature are all co-operating to keep the child in the path of self-realisation, and as Egeria has allied herself with those forces and is working with them in every possible way, the rewards which the Utopian wins for himself are very many, while the punishments which he inflicts on himself are very few. In other words, the pressure on him to exert himself is so strong, his opportunities for exerting himself (under Egeria's sympathetic rule) are so many, and the pleasure of exerting himself is found to be so great, that the temptation to be idle or rebellious can scarcely be said to exist.

It is indeed in respect of the motives to exertion which they respectively supply, that the superiority of the Utopian to the conventional type of education is perhaps most pronounced. I have said that Egeria allies herself with the expansive forces of Nature. The teacher of the conventional type has to fight against those forces. Let us assume that the two teachers are on a level in respect of their capacity for influencing and stimulating their pupils, and let us indicate that level by the algebraical symbol x. Then the difference between the motive force which Egeria exerts, and the motive force which her rival exerts, is the difference between x + y, and x - y, y being used to symbolise the aggregate motive force of the expansive tendencies of the child's inner nature. Such a difference is incalculable. The scheme of education which is based on distrust of the child's nature and belief in its intrinsic sinfulness and stupidity, necessarily arrays against itself the hidden forces of that maligned and despised nature, and must needs overcome their resistance before it can hope to achieve its proposed end. While Egeria is helping Nature to provide suitable channels for the various expansive tendencies that are at work in the child, and to guide them all into the central channel of self-realisation, her rival is engaged in digging a canal (to be filled, when finished, with dead, stagnant water) which is so designed that not only will no use be made by it of the life stream of the child's latent energies, but also costly culverts and other works will have to be constructed for it in order to divert and send to waste that troublesome current.

The waste of motive force which goes on under any scheme of education through mechanical obedience, is indeed enormous. And what is most lamentable is that the energies of the teacher are being largely wasted in the effort to neutralise the latent energies of the child. No wonder that, in order to produce his meagre and illusory, "results," the teacher should have to resort to motive forces which, by appealing to the lower side of the child's nature, will enable him to bear down the resistance, and, in doing so, to impede the outgrowth of the higher,—to the hope of external rewards and the threat of external punishments. And no wonder that, owing to the teacher having to work unceasingly against the grain of the child's nature, of these two demoralising forces, the fear of punishment—which, if not the more demoralising, is certainly the more wasteful of energy—should bulk the more largely in the eyes of the child.

In fine, then, whereas the conventional type of education is so wasteful of motive force that it dissipates the greater part of the teachers' and the scholars' energies in needless friction,—in Utopia, on the other hand, there is such an economy of motive force that the very joy which, under its scheme of education, always accompanies the child's expenditure of energy, and which might be regarded as merely a waste by-product, becomes in its turn a powerful incentive to further exertion.

* * * * *

"But is there not too much joy in Utopia? Is not the sky too cloudless? Is not the atmosphere too clear? Does the Utopian never act from a sense of duty? Has he never to do anything that is distasteful to him?" This objection raises an interesting question. Is the function of the sense of duty to enable us to do distasteful things? And if so, are we to regard it as the highest of motives to moral action? In the days when Kant's idea of the "moral imperative" was in the ascendant, the belief got abroad that the essence of virtue was to do what you hated doing. Looking back to my Oxford days, I recall some doggerel lines, of German origin, in which this belief finds apt expression. A disciple who is in trouble about his soul says to his master:

"Willing serve I my friends, but do it, alas! with affection, And so gnaws me my heart, that I'm not virtuous yet."

To this the master replies:

"Help except this there is none: you must strive with might to contemn them, And with horror perform then what the law may enjoin."

If this conception of morality is correct, if it is true that the atmosphere of the virtuous life should be one of horror and even of hatred, then it must be admitted that the Utopian children are receiving a seriously defective education. But the "if" is a large one; and for my part I incline to the belief that love, as a motive to action, is better than hatred, joy than horror, sunshine than gloom.

The day will indeed come when the Utopian—a child no longer—will have to do things, either for his own sake or in order to discharge obligations to others, which will be, or will seem to be, against the grain even of his happy nature; and the sense of duty will then have to come to his aid. But there is no reason why he, or his teachers, should anticipate that day. To compel him, while still a child, to work against the grain of his nature, when there was no real need for this, would not be the best preparation for the trials that await him. To compel him to spend the greater part of his school-life in doing what was distasteful to him, would be the worst possible preparation for them.

For, to begin with, the sense of duty is not the highest motive to action. A far higher motive is love. If the sense of duty to God, for example, had not devotion to God and love of God behind it, the object of one's worship would be a malignant rather than a beneficent deity, a devil rather than a God. Or let us take the case of a child who is dangerously ill, and who needs to be carefully and even devotedly nursed. By whom will he be the more effectively nursed,—by his mother who loves him passionately, or by a hired nurse who cannot be expected to love him but who has a strong sense of duty to her employers? (I am assuming that as regards professional skill, and the sense of duty to God, the two women are on a level.) Surely the mother, sustained by love in the endurance of sleeplessness and fatigue, and in the exercise of that unceasing vigilance which lets no symptom escape it, will be the better nurse. Love, as a motive to moral action, has the immense advantage over the sense of duty of being able to rob the hour of trial of its gloom, by strengthening the lover to make light of labour and difficulty till at last the sense of effort is lost in the sense of joy. But if love is the highest of all motives, is it not well that the child's life should as far as possible, and for as long as possible, be kept under its influence, to the exclusion of other motives. We have seen that the Utopian child takes many things in his stride which other children would regard as distasteful. If they are not distasteful to him, the reason is that he does them, not from a sense of duty, but under the inspiration of love,—love of life, love of Egeria, love of his schoolmates, love of his school. And the longer he can remain on the high plane of love, the better it will be for his after life.

And when the time comes for him to yield himself to the "saving arms" of duty, he will have had the best of all preparations for that hour of trial, for he will have been braced and strengthened for it by the most moralising of all disciplines, that of growth. What is the sense of duty? We too seldom ask ourselves this question. Is it not a feeling of obligation, of being in debt, to some person, or persons, or institution, or society, or even to some invisible Power;—to a friend, for example, a relative, a dependent, an employer, a "contracting party," a commanding officer,—or, again, to one's trade or profession, to one's political party, to one's church, to one's country,—or, in the last resort, to God? And is not this feeling accompanied by the secret conviction that until the debt has been liquidated, to the best of the debtor's ability, justice will not have been done? The sense of duty is, I think, a derivative sense, an offshoot from the more primitive sense of justice,—a sense so primitive that it may almost be said to have made possible our social life. If this is so, if the sense of duty is resolvable into the sense of justice, then the training which is given in Utopia—a training which makes for healthy and harmonious growth, and therefore (as we have seen) for outgrowth or escape from self—is the best preparation for a life of duty, that can possibly be given. For under its influence the sense of justice, which is essentially a social instinct, knowing no distinction between oneself and one's neighbour, will be relieved of the hostile pressure of its arch-enemy, the anti-social instinct of selfishness,[21] and will therefore make rapid and vigorous growth. The sense of justice is, as might be expected, strongly developed in the selfless atmosphere of Utopia, where indeed it has helped, in no small degree, to evolve the wonderful social life of the school; and, that being so, there is no fear but what the Utopian will be sustained by the sense of duty when the time comes for him to work against the grain of his nature. But however strong may be his sense of duty, he will always have the great advantage of being seldom called upon to do what he dislikes, and therefore of being able to keep the fibre of his sense of duty from being either unduly relaxed or unduly hardened by overwork; for he has been accustomed from his earliest days to make light of, and even find a pleasure in, what is usually accounted drudgery, and he has been accustomed to work, in school and out of school, under the inspiration of joy and love.